During the medieval period and early modern Japan, decapitation was a common method of execution for criminals and defeated enemy warriors. During the feudal period, particularly under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), beheading became a standard execution method for many serious crimes.

Decapitation was also common on the battlefield. During Japan's long era of civil wars, especially the Sengoku period, warriors routinely took the heads of defeated enemies and presented to the victorious lord. For criminals or rebellious warriors, the heads were displayed publically as a warning and deterrent to others.

A Japanese block print depicting the decapitation of violent Chinese soldiers. Circa 1894. Credit: Museum of Fine Arts

Scattered across Florence, in the narrow streets, is a curious architectural feature that many visitors walk past without noticing. Set into the walls of grand Renaissance palaces are tiny arched openings, barely large enough to pass a bottle through. These openings, known as buchette del vino or “wine windows,” were originally created to sell wine directly from aristocratic estates to ordinary citizens. While they were born out of economic necessity in the 16th century, these small windows gained renewed importance during periods of epidemic disease, helping Florentines conduct business while minimizing physical contact.

A wine window, still functioning. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Long before the first commercial oil wells appeared in North America, Chinese engineers had already mastered the art of drilling deep into the earth. In the salt-producing region of Zigong in China's Sichuan Province, workers were sinking wells hundreds of meters deep using techniques that would not become common in the West until many centuries later. These remarkable salt wells not only transformed the economy of inland China but also helped inspire the drilling methods that fuelled the 19th-century oil boom in the United States.

A salt drilling field near Zigong, Sichuan, in 1929. Credit: South China Morning Post

Not all forms of communication are based on speech or writing. Just as the Inca encoded information in strings and knots known as quipus, and the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands created intricate navigational charts from sticks and seashells, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia developed their own sophisticated means of transmitting information across vast distances. Known as message sticks, these small carved pieces of wood, rich in symbolism, served as important tools of communication between different communities.

An early 20th century Aboriginal message stick, almost a meter in length, made of extremely dense hardwood, and with ochre coating message on both sides. Credit: Carter's

A remote village in north-western China, on the edge of the Gobi desert, is said to have been founded by Roman soldiers. According to this controversial theory, the village of Zhelaizhai in China's Gansu Province was established by Roman legionaries who were captured after a disastrous battle, carried across Central Asia, and eventually settled on the far eastern edge of the known world. While most historians remain sceptical of the claim, the story has become one of the most fascinating legends linking the ancient civilizations of Rome and China.

Re-enactment of a Roman legion. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Somewhere in the hills of Virginia, the United States, according to an enduring legend, there remains buried a vast fortune in gold, silver, and jewels. The location of this treasure is obfuscated by a cipher first made public some 140 years ago. Whether the treasure is real or an elaborate hoax, the Beale Ciphers have fascinated treasure hunters, cryptographers, and historians alike.

The story first became public in 1885 through a pamphlet titled The Beale Papers. According to the pamphlet, a man named Thomas J. Beale led a group of about thirty adventurers from Virginia on a buffalo-hunting expedition to the American West in 1817. During their travels, they allegedly discovered a rich deposit of gold and silver somewhere near present-day Colorado or New Mexico.

A plaque at the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, Virginia, where a dig was officially authorized. Credit: Virginia Hill

More than two thousand years before modern engineers bored tunnels beneath rivers and seas, ancient writers told of an astonishing passage hidden beneath the waters of the Euphrates. According to these accounts, a brick-lined tunnel ran beneath the river at Babylon, linking the city's two halves and allowing people to cross unseen below the current. If the story is true, the Euphrates Tunnel may have been the world's first underwater tunnel—a feat of engineering centuries ahead of its time. However, no trace of the structure has ever been found, leaving historians to wonder whether it was a genuine marvel of ancient engineering or another one of history's enduring legends.

The Euphrates River. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the summer of 1953, a stray dog stepped off a freight train at the railway station of Campiglia Marittima, a small town in Tuscany, Italy. Nobody knew where he had come from or how long he had been wandering. Mirna, the daughter of the stationmaster Elvio Barlettani, fell in love with the dog and persuaded her father to let her adopt him. Barlettani reluctantly agreed because rail regulations strictly forbade employees from adopting dogs. Barlettani named him Lampo, the Italian word for “lightning.” It was a fitting name. Lampo was energetic, intelligent, and seemingly incapable of staying in one place for long.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont was a Spanish polymath who was far ahead of his time. Centuries before the Industrial Revolution, this Spanish nobleman was designing steam-powered machines, diving suits, submarines, ventilation systems, and dozens of other inventions. But Ayanz was far more than an inventor. He served as a soldier, administrator, artist, musician, and engineer during Spain’s Golden Age. His remarkable versatility earned him a reputation as one of the great polymaths of his era. Yet despite receiving patents for dozens of inventions and successfully testing many of them, his achievements remained largely forgotten for centuries.

In 1905, a little-known journalist named Edgar Wallace was determined to make his first novel impossible to ignore. The book was The Four Just Men, a thriller about a group of vigilantes who take justice into their own hands when the law proves inadequate. The novel would eventually become one of Wallace's most famous works and launch a long-running series. Yet its initial publication is remembered less for its literary success than for one of the most spectacular marketing disasters in publishing history.

Credit: ZVAB

On 9 October 1917, during the Third Battle of Ypres, a battalion of Australian soldiers entered a place known as Celtic Wood, near Passchendaele in West Flanders, Belgium, to attack German positions. Most were never seen again. Of the 85 men to raid Celtic Wood, just 14 made it back to their lines. The rest vanished without a trace. The fate of the lost battalion has remained one of the greatest enigmas of Australia's Great War.

The battlefield in Poelcapelle, Belgium. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The windswept plateau in central Wales, near the village of Sennybridge in Powys, was once home to a thriving Welsh-speaking farming society whose roots stretched back generations. During World War 2, this community was evicted to make way for what is now the third largest military training area in the United Kingdom. The disappearance of Mynydd Epynt remains one of the most controversial episodes in modern Welsh history.

For many Welsh people, Epynt stands alongside the flooding of Capel Celyn as a symbol of a community sacrificed in the name of a greater national cause. The slogan “Cofiwch Epynt” (“Remember Epynt”) continues to appear on walls and roadside signs across Wales, ensuring that the story is not forgotten.

The 'Cofiwch Fynydd Epynt' (Remember Epynt Mountain) mural, in Llanrug. Credit: Daily Post

The design and working principle of a windmill or a wind powered machine haven’t changed much since they first appeared in Persia some 1,200 years ago. All windmills contain vanes or sails exposed to the wind, which causes them to turn. The rotary motion is then used to do work, such as grind grains into flour or pump water.

In 1868, French engineer Ernest Sylvain Bollée came up with a new design that made his windmill look and work radically different from a traditional windmill.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the late 18th century, no man in Edinburgh seemed more respectable than William Brodie. By day, he was a successful cabinetmaker, a member of the city council, and a deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons, one of the most prestigious tradesmen's guilds in Scotland. But by night, Brodie led a secret life as a burglar and thief, moving through the dark streets of the city with the same keys and skills that had earned him the trust of its wealthiest citizens.

His extraordinary double life eventually ended at the gallows. A century later, Brodie’s life inspired one of literature's most famous tales of dual identity: Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

On October 19, 1906, a modest 70-foot sailing vessel slipped into San Francisco Bay. Compared with the large steamships and ocean-going vessels that crowded the harbour, she appeared unremarkable. Yet the small ship had attracted a small crowd that day, for she had just accomplished one of the greatest feats in the history of exploration.

The vessel was Gjøa, and aboard her were the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and six companions. After a voyage lasting more than three years through the frozen waterways of the Canadian Arctic, they had become the first people to successfully navigate the Northwest Passage—a route that generations of explorers had sought, and many had died trying to find.

Roald Amundsen arrives at Nome aboard Gjøa, dated 31 August 1906. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the frigid waters of the Canadian Arctic, nearly 100 meters beneath the surface, lies a ship seemingly untouched by time. Despite the passage of more than a century, she is more or less intact, except for a gaping hole in her starboard side. Two of her masts still rise from the seabed.

The ship is Breadalbane, the world’s northernmost known shipwreck, and also one of the best-preserved wooden ships ever found in the sea. She lies approximately 1,000 km south of the North Pole.

The Breadalbane and Phoenix beset in ice. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

When Britain entered the Second World War in September 1939, military planners understood that thousands of Allied servicemen would inevitably fall into enemy hands. Traditionally, prisoners of war were expected simply to endure captivity until the conflict ended. But this time, the British military establishment began to develop a very different philosophy.

To coordinate rescue and escape efforts, Britain established MI9, a secret department dedicated to helping Allied servicemen evade capture and escape from occupied Europe. At its head was the determined Norman Crockatt, a brigadier who transformed escape from a private ambition into an official duty.

Highly detailed map printed on silk were supplied to Allied PoW to help them escape. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

On November 9, 1963, two investigators from France’s Central Office for Counterfeit Currency Control (OCRFM) arrived at the post office on Rue Turgot in Paris’s 9th arrondissement. Five days earlier, a customer had purchased 1,000 francs’ worth of Treasury bonds there using a stack of crisp 100-franc notes bearing the portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte. At first glance, nothing seemed unusual. The notes looked authentic, felt authentic, and even carried convincing watermarks. But they were counterfeit.

A 'Bonaparte' 100 Franc notes that Ceslaw Bojarski forged. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

On 18 November 1870, a crowd gathered outside the Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh. Inside, seven young women sat for an anatomy examination alongside male medical students. Outside, hundreds of men jeered, shouted insults, and attempted to force the gates. Mud, rubbish, and abuse rained down on the women as they tried to enter the building. Some of the male students reportedly released a sheep into the hall as a mockery of the female candidates. Others, more sympathetic ones, tried to shield the women and escorted them out of the college in safety once the examination was over.

Surgeons’ Hall, the site of the 1870 riots. Credit: Billy Wilson